Realmac Software

I launched my first (Rapidweaver) website today. I would appreciate some honest critiques. Don’t worry about hurting my feelings. I’m a big girl.

Lois

I just noticed that my contact form I put in the side bar with Pluskit has crazy text in it. What did I do wrong?

Thanks!

hi Lois,
welcome to the forums!

First some comments on the design:
- the menu items aren’t visible unless you hover over them. I’d change the color for the normal state to something brighter.
- for my taste the colors you used don’t fit to the product. With wooden products like yours I’d recommend some more warm, woody colors for the site design as well. Right now the site looks quite cold, distant - and the red is far too aggressive. Why don’t you just sample some colors from your images and use them for the parts of the pages?

Now for your questions:
- the page that you import the contact form into needs to be a php-page as well. Otherwise the code will not work and display as the weird letters you’re seeing. Simply go into the Page Inspector of the page you imported the form into, go to the file name field and change the extension from .html to .php
This will solve the problem.
- SiteLok is an excellent solution if you want more elaborated functions from a login module than a simple protection from being visible to everybody (Lockdown from LogHound does this simple thing much more easily. But it doesn’t offer the detailled functionality of SiteLok. Plus the Vibralogix people are extremely helpful and supportive.

loisduncan - 15 July 2010 02:19 AM

How am I doing so far?

Hi Lois; nice looking site. I agree with Markus though about the links; they need to be a lot lighter than that if people are going to see them properly; I know they’re repeated in the sidebar, but still. A few observations:

The image on your Home page, at the bottom, that is probably your logo, is very fuzzy; could do with remaking.
You have a menu item called ‘FAQ’s’â??plurals never have apostrophes, so it should be ‘FAQs’. Come to that, ‘FAQ’ stands for ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ so the ‘s’ is built in anyway â?¦ you could just put ‘FAQ’ as the menu item. Funny, this is the second time I’ve written this on the forum in ten minutes!
Something more serious: if you go to your Home page (or several others) and then go to the ‘View’ menu in Safari and choose ‘Zoom text only’, then hit Apple + to enlarge the text, you’ll see that the text gets cut off at the bottom. On other pages, ‘Getting Started’ for instance, it flows over what is below quite badly too. This is because you’ve used Blocks to make the pages, where Stacks or even an ordinary Styled Text page would have been better. Blocks is very clever, especially for image-heavy pages, but it’s really difficult to use it for mixed text and images.

Hope you don’t mind me pointing these things out.

Markus -

Thanks for your honesty. I totally agree about the colors. Originally I designed everything in beautiful warm greens and browns. The client was insistent on the black, red & gray colors. I tried to explain to them that the colors didn’t fit the product. Also their logo is hideous (- notice it only appears once on the site.) I begged them to let me create a better logo in more appropriate colors. Once again they were insistent it remain unchanged. I don’t know why they want to keep it but it is their choice.

As far as the links they are the theme default colors. I agree they are too dark. I will change them today.

Paul -

I’m really not crazy about their logo. I’m use to working with high res images for print design. How do you keep the images from looking fuzzy when you lower the resolution for the web?

Oh and the FAQ - I totally knew that. LOL I can’t believe I did that. Thanks so much for pointing that out.

I am actually very frustrated with how the Blocks causes the text to overflow into the images in certain browsers. I may consider switching all the pages to Stacks pages. 

I really appreciate your comments. Thanks!

loisduncan - 15 July 2010 01:34 PM

I’m really not crazy about their logo. I’m use to working with high res images for print design. How do you keep the images from looking fuzzy when you lower the resolution for the web?

Are you resampling the pic? I generally use Photoshop, with the ‘resample’ box ticked, the the ‘Bicubic Sharper’ interpolation method, which usually stops pictures getting fuzzy; if it doesn’t work, I sharpen them a bit afterwards.

I am actually very frustrated with how the Blocks causes the text to overflow into the images in certain browsers. I may consider switching all the pages to Stacks pages.

It’s not so much ‘certain browsers’ as ‘all browsers’. It’s not a browser thing, it’s an HTML thing. I’d use Stacks.

So I re-did the entire site today! Love or hate it?

http://www.hearthstonedealers.com

loisduncan - 15 July 2010 07:35 PM

So I re-did the entire site today! Love or hate it?

http://www.hearthstonedealers.com

Love it! Much nicer looking than the other one. Still got a couple of gripes though

On the ‘Cabinet Construction’ page, the photo is fuzzy and the small type is hard to read. It’s a PNG too, which makes it ten times bigger than it needs to be.

On the ‘Cabinet Doors’ photo album, the doors are showing some distortion; they’re bowed, and the sides aren’t parallel. Tricky to clean up without Photoshop, but I’m just sayin’.

Great job, though!

One thing I forgot to say before: on the ‘Product Overview’ page, at the bottom, you have some bulleted lists which you’ve done by typing in the bullets manually; that’s not the best way to do it because, as you can see, where it runs over into two lines, the second line begins under the bullet, not under the first character of the first line. A better way to do this is to select all the lines after removing the bullets and go to Format>List and choose a solid bullet. That will make sure the lines are vertically above each other and the bullets are out in front.

Paul,

Thank you so much for all your insights. I completely revamped the “Cabinet Construction” page and fixed the bullets on the Product Overview. Your comments have been very helpful. Thanks again.

Lois

loisduncan - 16 July 2010 04:10 PM

Paul,

Thank you so much for all your insights. I completely revamped the “Cabinet Construction” page and fixed the bullets on the Product Overview. Your comments have been very helpful. Thanks again.

Lois

It’s a pleasure. Looks great now! Are those images to either side in the background new? Can’t remember them from last time. Nice.

I think your site looks great. I’d love to learn to add some of the features you’ve added here. I am really an amateur so I’m sure my opinion doesn’t hold much water around here haha, but I thought I’d share it anyways.

Looks great!  I had 2 thoughts looking at the site.

You have nice pictures on each page that do a good job of giving a feel and brand identity to your website.  But they are always too far down the page in my opinion.  I think it would work better if they were better integrated with the text and page, so they were higher up.  Instead of just big text block, then image underneath.  Something that might be worth playing around with.  One page has a big white space below the text too.  I don’t think it’s a good idea to make people scroll to see the images.  Best is to have it all in one window, and scroll for text or additional images if necessary. 

I also think that you could have more color in the background image.  I’m not sure if you did that yourself, or not.  But I could see it coming all the way around the edges more and that looking nice.  You could probably even just repeat that image with pretty good affect. 

Just my first impressions

Thanks so much to everyone for your critiques. I have taken a lot of your suggestions and implemented them. I am so pleased with how the site is looking now. I have learned SO much in the last week. But wow! this is fun! Can be very frustrating but when you finally figure something out… how rewarding!

Thanks again everyone!!

Lois

rhythmdevils - 23 July 2010 11:28 PM

Looks great!  I had 2 thoughts looking at the site.

You have nice pictures on each page that do a good job of giving a feel and brand identity to your website.  But they are always too far down the page in my opinion.  I think it would work better if they were better integrated with the text and page, so they were higher up.  Instead of just big text block, then image underneath. (FIXED IT!! - thanks) Something that might be worth playing around with.  One page has a big white space below the text too.  I don’t think it’s a good idea to make people scroll to see the images.  Best is to have it all in one window, and scroll for text or additional images if necessary. 

I also think that you could have more color in the background image.  I’m not sure if you did that yourself, or not.  But I could see it coming all the way around the edges more and that looking nice.  You could probably even just repeat that image with pretty good affect. 

Just my first impressions